Roses Are Made

This year, if you get a picture of a rose instead of an actual rose, keep the following in mind: Roses that make a good picture don't smell like much, so you're not missing anything!

Roses are popular, and they have been cultivated over centuries to have all kinds of different features. Some are chosen to smell good, and some to look good. That usually means the roses that look good do not smell good. (Some varieties are simply more durable; when you're shipping those flowers all over the world, durability is a desired trait.)

And wouldn't you know it; people tend to like the kind that look good more than the latter. This means most of our roses these days have lost their multisensory seduction.

This is great example of natural selection at its most sophisticated –in the domain of the anthroposphere. It is true that humans are selecting the flowers they want to propagate, and that doesn't sound like nature at the wheel.

But these humans impose their artificial selection pressures only in response to market forces, or customer demand, or fashion, or whatever you want to call it. And as any fashion designer will tell you, there is not much reasoning behind the preferences of populations. Individuals perhaps, but populations not so much.

In a game of complexity theory, every individual makes decisions that are a result of every other individual. The resulting decisions then determine the kinds of flowers selected. Channeling Dawkins' Memetics, the scentless rose is an extended phenotype of our collective selection process. Is that natural or artificial?

Notes:

New genetic details may help roses come up smelling like, well, roses

Susan Milius for Science News, 2018

O. Raymond et al. The Rosa genome provides new insights into the domestication of modern roses. Nature Genetics. Published online April 30, 2018. doi:10.1038/s41588-018-0110-3.

Scientists Figure Out Why Roses Don't Smell as Good as They Used To

Mental Floss, 2018

The Extended Phenotype

Richard Dawkins, 1982

Post Script:

Favorite "Rose" perfume:

Mon Nom est Rouge by Majda Bekkali (for women and men)

Biohacker Humanoids

Typical olfactory bulbs might not be necessary for smell, case study suggests

Nov 2019, phys.org

Looking at people's brains has been getting easier every day. And that's why we now know that there's people out there who can smell perfectly fine without having and olfactory bulb, because brains do whatever they want.

Not that crazy of an idea, considering the tongue-eyeball prosthesis, where electrodes on your tongue take wirelessly the signals sent by your partially-working retina, so they can be sent to a processing center that still works, that being the taste-center; you're hijacking your tastebuds to be able to see. After a while your brain is able to make sense out of the patterns of electricity sent to your tongue from your open eyeballs. You're not exactly tasting light anymore, but seeing it.

As for smells, same thing apparently. No bulb? No problem, the receptors still work, and we can just bypass the non-functioning area. That's called plasticity, and the brain has a lot of it.

(But in this case, it only works for left-handed women. This isn't too much of a surprise; if there were any population to have this ability, it would be women since they are better at smelling things, and because left-handed people are biasing their right-brain, which has a larger role in olfactory processing. Then again, who knows why.)

-image source: Richard Pousette-Dart, Celebration, Birth, 1976

Post Script:

We're doing a slightly deeper dive into this, taking this passage from a science weblog:

The researchers then wanted to explore how the world smells to these individuals. They asked the three volunteers and 140 women of similar age to smell 10 odorants and use visual analogue scales to rate each odor by 11 descriptors. This generated enough data points to create an olfactory perceptual fingerprint that visually and numerically represents how each person perceives scents. The olfactory perceptual fingerprints of the two women who could smell without apparent olfactory bulbs fell within the norm of the study. Yet, the two women were unusually similar to each other in their smell perceptions, ranking closer than 96 percent of any other two participants.

Two things to highlight here – first, the study they used to get the "olfactory perceptual fingerprint" can be found here:

378-dimensional individual olfactory receptor subtype genome

Individual olfactory perception reveals meaningful nonolfactory genetic information.

Secundo L, Snitz K, Weissler K, Pinchover L, Shoenfeld Y, Loewenthal R, Agmon-Levin N, Frumin I, Bar-Zvi D, Shushan S, Sobel N. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Jul 14; 112(28):8750-5.

Personally I think this study is even more interesting because it suggests that we can ultimately do genetic testing on people just by getting them to smell some things. Our olfactory receptors take up a huge part of our genome, almost 2%, which is a lot for a sensory system. If we can identify an olfactory fingerprint, then we've already got 2% of your genome, and with nothing more than ten bottles of essential oil, and a pen and paper.

Next point; if we each have a unique olfactory fingerprint, and yet it's also a really rare thing to be able to smell without having an olfactory bulb, then you could bet that the people who share that rare thing also have similar fingerprints.

There's more to be read here about how we choose mates, based on immune system compatibility, and mediated by olfaction. But the bottom line is that in the coming bioware tech revolution, olfaction is a model information system.

Notes:

Olfactory bulb aka glomeruli map

Olfactory perceptual fingerprint aka

The 378-Dimensional Individual Olfactory Receptor Subtype Genome

The Human Connectome Project

Navigate the brain in a way that was never before possible; fly through major brain pathways, compare essential circuits, zoom into a region to explore the cells that comprise it, and the functions that depend on it.

The Human Connectome Project aims to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data, an interface to graphically navigate this data and the opportunity to achieve never before realized conclusions about the living human brain.

Human Olfaction Without Apparent Olfactory Bulbs.

Tali Weiss, Timna Soroka, Lior Gorodisky, Edna Furman-Haran, Thijs Dhollander, Noam Sobel. Neuron, volume 105 issue 1, pp35-45, Jan 2020. https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30854-2 , DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2019.10.006

Sensory Nutrition

The Monell Center for taste and smell research sheds some light on the emerging field of Sensory Nutrition. Sure we're all human, and all made of the same stuff, and all programmed by DNA that is pretty darn similar. But we are not the same. We don't even taste or smell things the same, and much of that difference starts with our DNA.

Boy did I have a great conversation the other night about a friend of a friend who tried to fuse Mexican food into a Korean city's cuisine. Didn't work. Why? Cilantro, that's why.

Ambitious food alchemist didn't do his homework -- Asians in general tend to taste cilantro as "soap," i.e., gross. This isn't about preference, it's about genetics. For whatever reason, some of us code cilantro as soap and others as the most refreshing herb ever.

Monell researchers could have told him that. They're using big data, machine learning, and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to understand the interface between sensory science, nutrition, and dietetics. They're ultimately trying to see if we can guide people into the right public health intervention just based on their genes.

Behavioral geneticist Danielle Reed, PhD, and olfactory neurobiologist Joel Mainland, PhD, helped to mine 400,000 reviews of 67,000 food products posted by 256,000 Amazon customers over 10 years. That's the big data part. The machine learning part analyzed words related to taste and smell, as well as other categories related to health.

Output? People today think food is too sweet. Wow. Never would have guessed that. No matter kind of food they were talking about, one percent of all reviews used the words "too sweet."

On the other side of the taste spectrum, and from a totally different study – there's a gene that helps you taste bitter, but if you have a hyped-up version, you will taste too much bitter, especially in vegetables like dark greens. Maybe even other bitter things coffee and beer will taste way different to you.

For reference (go ahead, dial up your time machine to about ten years into the future and pull up your DNA database), it's the taste gene TAS2R38. It codes for bitter-taste receptors on the tongue. And it has two variants, the AVI and PAV variants. Depending on the combination, you'll have a very different experience with certain bitter chemicals.

So the headline is that we're hardwired to like or dislike vegetables. Camouflaging bitter tastes with culinary creativity might not hurt. Just make sure to do your homework.

Notes:

Monell Annual Report 2018-2019

Monell Center, Philadelphia PA

Some people 'genetically wired' to avoid some vegetables

Nov 2019, BBC News